Extrasensory Communication and Dreams

by Jon Tolaas and Montague
Ullman

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

As far back as we have written
records, there have been accounts of the unusual phenomena occurring in
connection with dreams. The ancients typically believed that dreams were
divinely inspired experiences providing counsel and instruc­tion for their
waking lives. In the oldest dream book extant, the Egyptian papyrus of
Deral-Madineh dating back to 2000 B.C., there arc examples of divine
revelation. The Egyptians practiced dream incubation, i.e., sleeping in temples
in a deliberate effort to induce divinely inspired dreams which would supply
answers concerning the state of health and the future of the dreamer. Oracular
dreams even affected affairs of state (Woods, 1947). So-called para­normal
phenomena often seemed to have an affinity for dreams. Woods (1947) notes that
the Egyptians tried to communicate with others through their dreams, believing
that homeless spirits carried the message. This suggests that there was some
familiarity with the idea of telepathic communication.

In Judeo-Christian and Islamic
scriptures the divinely inspired dream is a well-known theme. Van de Castle
(1971) notes that there are about 70 refer­ences to dreams and visions in the
Bible. One well-known dream, possibly suggestive of telepathic influence, is
the dream of Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 2:1-35). The king awoke one morning and was
unable to remember a dream he felt was oracular in nature. His dream
interpreters were frustrated. When Daniel was consulted, he turned to God in
prayer, and Nebuchadnezzar's dream was revealed to him in a night vision. He
then related the dream to Nebuchad­nezzar, who recognized it as his own.

In contrast to the Egyptians and
the Jews, Orientals did not attribute dreams to the interference of gods, but
to the dreamer's own soul. In ancient Vedic literature (1500-1000 B.C.) dreaming is seen as an intermediate state of the soul between this world
and the other. In the sleeping state the soul leaves the body in "breath's
protection" and roams in space, where it sees both this world and the
other.

This belief, which seemingly
gives credence to telepathy, was introduced in Greece as early as 500 B.C. (Van
de Castle, 1971) and is well-known in European folklore (Tylor, 1871). The
Greeks, however, were more inclined to the tradi­tion of the divine message
dream, a tradition favored by their Eastern neighbors (Dodds, 1957). They
distinguished between oracular dreams without symbolism and symbolic ones whose
divine message had to be unraveled by professional interpreters.

Most of the dreams that have
come down to us from antiquity are prophetic or precognitive, only a few of
these available dreams lending themselves to a telepathic explanation. The word
telepathy (from the Greek roots tele, or distant, and pathe, or
feeling) was coined in the nineteenth century by F. W. H. Myers (1903).

With Democritus and Aristotle
there began what may be called the naturali­zation of the supernatural dream.
Democritus (460-370 B.C.) is credited with the first physical theory of dream
telepathy (Dodds, 1971). His view of telep­athy is derived from the thesis that
everything, including the soul, is made up of innumerable, indivisible, minute
particles called atoms. These atoms con­stantly emit images of themselves,
which in turn are composed of still other atoms. He postulated that the images
projected by living beings, when emotion­ally charged, could be transmitted to
a dreamer (percipient). When the images reached their destination, they were
believed to enter the body through the pores. Images emitted by people in an
excited state were especially vivid and likely to reach the dreamer in an
intact and undistorted form because of the frequency of emission and the speed
of transmission. The importance he assigned to the emotional state of the agent
or sender is certainly in keeping with both present-day anecdotal and
experimental findings.

Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)
rejected the notion of a divine origin of dreams. In his essay "On
Divination In Sleep" (Woods, 1947) he discussed veridical dreams and took
issue with Democritus' atomist thesis. The topic of his essay is pre­cognitive
dreams, but his theory appears to be primarily applicable to instances of
telepathy. He compared what happens in telepathic transmission with the ripple
effect created by a stone thrown into water. Waves are propagated through the
air of the night and "nothing hinders but a certain motion and sense may
arrive to souls that dream ...." There are motions during the day­time as
well, but the night is more tranquil so that the motions are not so easily
dissolved. Besides, "those that are asleep have a greater perception of
small inward motions than those that are awake." Aristotle and Democritus
thus made the paranormal dream an object of scientific inquiry and postulated a
physical carrier for the information.

For the most part their ideas
were neither accepted nor further developed by later thinkers. Stoics like
Poseidonius (135-50 B.C.) again relegated oracular dreams to the divine sphere
(Dodds, 1971). Still later the Roman orator Cicero (104-43 B.C.) tried to
demolish both the arguments of the Stoics and Demo­critus. In a caustic comment
on Democritus, he writes, "I never knew anyone who talked nonsense with
greater authority ..." (On "Divination," quoted from Woods,
1947). In Artemidorus' Oneirocritica (about 200 A.D.), the main source of dream
philosophy in antiquity, there is no more Democritian "nonsense."

In the Middle Ages the Icelandic
sagas were a rich source of prophetic dreams (Turville-Petre, 1958;
Glendinning, 1974). The old Norsemen seem to have had a pragmatic attitude to
such dreams, acknowledging them as an integral and useful part of reality, but
they offered little in the way of explanation or theory. Thinkers like Thomas
Aquinas, Descartes, and Pascal, among others, addressed the subject of dreams,
but made no significant contribution to our understand­ing of those dreams that
challenge our concepts of time and space.

In 1819, Weserman published what
is probably the first report of experiment­ally induced dream telepathy (reviewed
later). His ideas did not arouse sufficient interest to spur further efforts by
contemporary investigators. There are scat­tered references to paranormal
dreams in many later sources, notably in the writings of the German physician
C. G. Carus (Meier, 1972). Not until the foundation of the Society for
Psychical Research in 1882 in England, did dream telepathy become an object of
genuine scientific inquiry.

Comment

The evidential value of
historical material of this kind cannot be assessed. Such reports, however, do
convey the thread of persistent belief in the link between dreaming and the
paranormal. Throughout the ages and in a wide variety of cultural settings, man
has been fascinated by dreams that seem to convey tele­pathic or precognitive
content.

PRELITERATE SOCIETIES

In preliterate societies, we
find either the belief that the dreamer's soul can quit the body and go for a
nocturnal excursion, or that human souls from without can visit the sleeper and
appear to him in his dream. The Maoris thought that the dreamer's soul could
travel to the abode of the dead and talk with its friends there (Tylor, 1871 ).
The Ibans of Borneo conversed with their special protectors, the spirits of the
deceased, who came to visit them in their sleep (MacDougall and Hose, 1912).
These two beliefs are not incompatible and can exist side by side, as was the
case with some North American Indians (Devereux, 1957;Tylor, 1871, Wallace,
1958). These beliefs suggest that dream telepathy was considered something
natural and useful. The Melanesians on the Trobriand Islands also believed in
induced telepathic dreams. A suitor could cast a spell over his be­loved and
induce her to dream a dream that would make her "desire the ex­change"
(Malinowski, 1927).

Comment

Many of the anecdotes on record
are insufficiently corroborated, and many of the ideas and beliefs are often
quite esoteric. Nevertheless, there is sufficient evidence to suggest some
factual distillate. Freud (1933) suggested that telep­athy might be a kind of
prototypic language, a language before language. So-­called primitive peoples
may have preserved some of this archaic means of communication. To our
knowledge no experimental work has been done on dream telepathy with
non-Western subjects. Three researchers, Foster (1943), Rose (1956), and Van de
Castle (1970, 1975) have tested such populations using ESP cards. Foster
obtained significant results (in one of two conditions) in tests administered
to Plains Indian children, as did Rose in tests given to aboriginal subjects in
Australia and New Zealand. Van de Castle obtained results at chance level
testing Cuna Indians. However, the results were signifi­cant when the subjects
were differentiated by sex and dream content scores.

ANECDOTAL MATERIAL

The founders of the Society for
Psychical Research faced the formidable task of defining and classifying a wide
range of unexplainable phenomena and setting standards for observation and
reporting. In 1886, three of the founders, E. Gurney, F. W. H. Myers, and F.
Podmore, published their historic work, Phantasms of the Living. Among
the 1300 pages of case histories, the book contains 149 cases of dream
telepathy. Myers defined the term telepathy as "the extrasensory
communication of impressions of any kind from one mind to another." These
men were astute investigators and were very exacting in their search for
evidentiality. In the 1880s, however, less was known about the vicissitudes of
memory and dream processes than today, so that not all the material they collected
would meet modern evidential standards.

Nevertheless, Phantasms of
the Living is still an invaluable source book. A typical example in this
collection (Gurney et al., 1886) follows:

My brother
and father were on a journey .... I dreamt ... I saw father driving in a
sledge, followed in another by my brother. They had to pass a cross-road on
which another traveller was driving very fast, also in a sledge with one horse.
Father scented to drive on without ohserving the other fellow, who would ...
have driven over father if he had not made his horse rear, so that I saw my
father drive under the hoofs of the horse. Every moment I expected the horse to
fall down and crush him. I called out: "Father! Father!" and awoke in
great fright. (vol. I, p. 202).

It was later discovered that the
dream corresponded in great detail with the actual event.

Characteristically, the theme of
this dream is one of imminent danger to some­one close to the percipient. The
common pattern that emerged from a review of the 149 cases of dream telepathy
indicated that:

1. Over half of the dreams concerned the theme of death.

2. Another large group was concerned with the occurrence of an emergency.

3. A smaller group focused on trivial matters.

4. In the majority of cases, the agent-percipient pairs were either
related or friends.

5. The percipients generally had no special psychic experiences or
abilities before the dream in question, so that these dreams were rare and
puzzling experiences.

We find the same common features
in the major modern surveys of uncor­roborated spontaneous cases by Rhine
(1962), Sannwald (1059a, b ), Prasad and Stevenson (1968), and Hanefeld (1968),
and in a survey of 300 cases by Green (1960). Surveys of the frequency and
modalities of psychic experiences by Brockhaus (1968) and Palmer and Dennis
(1975) and analysis of corrobated cases by Dale (1951) and Dale et al. (1962)
produced results in keeping with the pattern described above. Others who have
published related material are Flammarion (1900), Prince (1931), Stevens
(1949), and Priestley (1964).

There are, of course, obvious
reasons why dreams of death and serious ac­cidents might occur more frequently.
Dreams with high anxiety content or any very disturbing feeling tone would tend
to be more readily recalled, re­corded, and possibly reported to others. It
might also be that dreams of death are so common that chance coincidence alone
would explain the high incidence of apparently veridical dreams dwelling on
this theme. The authors of Phantasms of the Living considered this
objection and distributed a questionnaire to 5360 persons asking if they had
had a vivid dream of the death of someone known to them in the past 12 years.
Only one of every 26 persons queried had had such a dream, a fact that spoke
against the chance hypothesis. (For discussion, see Ullman et al., 1973, p.
12.)

The frequency analysis of
manifest dream content (Hall and Van de Castle, 1966) also indicates that the
subject of death does not occur frequently in dreams. If chance or coincidence
can be discounted, then dreams involving danger to or the death of someone
known to the dreamer may reflect the basic nature and function of telepathy as
an emergency communicative mechanism somehow linked to the dreaming state. This
notion is discussed in a later section.

Referring to the high proportion
of reported paranormal experiences occur­ring between friends and relatives,
Honorton (1975) notes that this would be expected because of the greater
probability of confirmation than if the occur­rence involved remote
acquaintances. Furthermore, unless the relationship permitted "some degree
of intimacy, it would be unlikely that either would be sufficiently uninhibited
to share unusual personal experiences." These considerations aside, there
may be more basic issues involved having to do with the biological significance
of closeness and intimacy. The prototype of closeness is, of course, the early
mother-child relationship. In the postnatal period closeness ensures protection
and a chance of survival for a number of species, man included. It is also the
basis of growth and personal development. If psi[1]
abilities manifest themselves early in life, and there is reason to believe
that they do (Schwarz, 1971), they would exert their effect within a matrix of
closeness and intimacy, a fact which may he related to the incidence of para­normal
phenomena occurring between parents and children as well as friends and
relatives in later life.

It is difficult to assess the
true incidence of telepathic dreaming because of the variability of factors
involved in their being reported. Cultural factors such as the low priority
given to dreams and general skepticism concerning what might appear to be the
occult, would also tend to lower the incidence of such reports.

Another factor at work may be
the failure to recognize the telepathic compo­nent in a dream. Rhine (1967)
distinguishes between realistic and unrealistic telepathic dreams, the
difference being that in the latter the message is carried by the meaning of
the fantasy, not by the exactness of the imagery. Where this is the case, many
such dreams would probably go unnoticed.

Analyses of anecdotal material
strongly suggest that the dreaming state is particularly favorable for the
occurrence of paranormal phenomena. In the cross-cultural surveys quoted,
dreams (precognitive or telepathic) account for 64.6% of the 7119 cases
reported by Rhine (1962), 63% of the 1000 cases reported by Sannwald (1959a,
b), 37% of the 300 cases analyzed by Green (1960), 52.4% of the 900 experiences
of Indian school children reported by Prasad and Stevenson (1968), and 38% of
several hundred cases collected by Hanefeld (1968) and considered to he
paranormal.

Most of the paranormal dreams on
record are precognitive (Van de Castle, 1977). In addition to the sources
already quoted (Green, 1960), Saltmarsh (1934) reported 281 cases of
precognition, of which 116 occurred in dreams. Based on intensive studies of
his own dreams, Dunne (1927) became convinced that precognition occurred in
dreams, and went on to develop a multidimensional theory of time to account for
the phenomenon. Two experimental attempts at testing the theory by Besterman
(1933) produced inconclusive results. In a third series, Dunne himself served
as subject. Of the 17 dreams he forwarded to Besterman in the course of four
months, four were suggestive of precognition (Besterman, 1933). Stevenson
(1960, 1965) and Barker (1967) published re­ports describing the precognition
of two disasters. Stevenson reported ten cases of precognition related to the
sinking of the Titanic, eight of which in­volved dreams. Barker collected 35
cases of precognition of the Aberfan coal slide in 1965, 25 of which occurred
in dreams. From a collection of 1300 dreams from one person, collected over a
period of many years, Bender (1966) reported a 10% incidence of precognitive
elements. Tenhaeff (1968) reported on precognitive elements in another
collection of dreams from a single individ­ual. Priestley (1964) provides a
number of interesting anecdotal accounts of precognitive dreams called to his
attention following a television broadcast.

SHARED
DREAMS

Shared dreams form an
interesting subcategory. They are defined by Hart (1965) as "those in
which two or more dreamers dream of each other in a common space-time
situation, and independently remember more or less of their surroundings, their
conversation, and their interactions within the dream" (p. 17). Numerous
examples have been reported by Hart (hart and Hart, 1933; Hart, 1959), in which
he and his wife seemed to experience such shared dreams. More recent examples
are given in accounts by Faraday (1975) and Donahoe (1974). Dream telepathy in
a group setting was observed by Randall (1977). He worked in a group setting
where there was an unusual degree of rapport and where telepathic
correspondences seemed to occur among the group members.

Comment

Interesting though the
spontaneous case reports may be, they do not provide hard evidence for the
reality of extrasensory effects in dreaming. Despite great care taken to verify
them, loopholes can generally be found that raise questions concerning any
paranormal explanation. The interest and value of the anecdotal reports lie in
the meaningful patterns that may appear from their analyses. The real-life
context, especially as noted in cross-cultural surveys, serves as a source of
ideas for experimental research and broadens the theoretical framework within
which such research is conducted. These accounts strongly suggest that the
dreaming state is the psi-conducive state. Psi correspondences in dreams were
found to be more complete and less fragmentary than in reports of waking psi
experiences (Honorton and Krippner, 1969).

EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES: HISTORICAL PRELUDE

Weserman (1819) is credited with
the first published report on experiments with telepathically induced dreams.
Serving as agent himself, he attempted to project his "animal
magnetism" into the dreams of friends who later re­ported their dreams to
him. Weserman claimed to have been successful on five occasions.

G. B. Ermacora (1895), an
Italian psychiatrist, attempted to induce telepathic dreams in a rather strange
experimental arrangement. His star subject was a medium in Padua, Signorina
Maria Manzini, who had a trance control called Elvira. When Signorina Manzini
went into a trance, Dr. Ermacora would suggest to Elvira the specific topic of
a dream she was to induce telepathically in Ange­lina, Maria's four-year-old
cousin. The latter would then relate her dream in the morning to the medium,
who, in turn, informed Dr. Ermacora. There were, indeed, striking
correspondences, but judged by modern standards, the experi­ments were
seriously lacking in precautions against sensory leakage. They re­main only of
historical interest.

EXPLORATORY STUDIES

In the early 1950s, Wilfred Daim
(1953), an Austrian psychotherapist, attempted to transmit a target to a
sleeping percipient. The target material consisted of a geometrical symbol and
a color in random combination. Target-dream corres­pondences were reported in
75% of 30 trials. At about the same time, explora­tory dream telepathy studies
were being initiated by Ullman and Dale (Ullman and Krippner, 1970). These
studies were designed to explore possible para­normal correspondences between
recorded dreams and events in each of their lives. The results were encouraging
and led to a series of exploratory studies using the all-night REM monitoring
technique to determine the onset and ter­mination of recurring dream sequences
(Aserinsky and Kleitman, 1953). This technique freed the investigator from
relying on the uncertainty of spontaneous dream recall in a dream telepathy
experiment.

Pilot studies along these lines
were initiated in 1960. Two rooms were used. The subject or percipient went to
sleep in one, and an agent or sender and EEG technician remained in a second
room. A variety of target materials was used including free-hand drawings,
pictures taken from magazines, movie clips, and three-dimensional objects., The
subject was awakened after several minutes of REM sleep and reported his dream
over an intercom to the experimental team.

The working hypothesis was that
the agent's preoccupation with the target material during the night might bring
about the inclusion of such material or aspects of it in the manifest content
of the subject's dreams. The following is an example of the kind of
correspondences that occurred:

A dentist was serving as subject
and Ullman as agent. The target material during the first part of the night was
a toy model of a yellow Citroen car, and during the latter part of the night a
picture showing an Oriental garden bordered with diamond-shaped stones and monk
who was meditating at one corner. In the second dream of the night, the subject
mentioned a road that was yellow in color and referred to a tractor-like
vehicle. There were references to diamond shapes in four of the subsequent
dreams.

Subjects differed widely in
their sensitivity and ability to incorporate tele­pathic stimuli. Of particular
interest was the fact that three disbelievers in ESP, so-called goats
(Schmeidler, 1945), did not succeed in incorporating target material. When the
correspondences did occur, they came about in a number of different ways,
varying from direct incorporation to the selective incorporation of certain elements
of form or color as well as correspondences based on symbolic relationships.

Comment

These studies pointed to the
usefulness of the REM monitoring technique as a way of experimentally
approaching the subject of dream telepathy. The results supported the working
hypothesis that psi effects could be incorporated into both manifest and
symbolic dream content. Further refinement of the design was indicated:

1. To eliminate all possibilities of sensory cues relating to the target
reaching the subject.

2. To arrange for the independent blind outside judging of possible corre­spondences
between target and dream.

3. To work out appropriate statistical techniques to evaluate any
matching process.

In 1962, with the establishment
of a Dream Laboratory at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, it became
possible to pursue the work along these lines.

FORMAL EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES

Formal experimental studies
involving standardized EEG-EMG-EOG monitoring began at Maimonides in June,
1964. Two formats were used; each will be illustrated in detail. The first one
involved a screening study of 12 subjects (Ullman et al., 1966) and two agents,
one male and one female.

Correspondences between target
material and dream reports were evaluated by each of the 12 subjects and three
outside judges who independently ranked the pool of 12 targets for
correspondences to each dream protocol. A dream protocol consisted of all the
dreams of a single night. Confidence ratings were also obtained. The dream
material was matched alone and in combination with the subject's postsleep
associational material. There were seven males and five females in the study.
They had no history of ESP, but expressed a positive attitude to the
possibility of its existence. Each subject slept in the laboratory for one
night. The targets were postcard-size reproductions of well-known paintings.
They were selected on the basis of emotional content, vivid colors, simplicity,
and distinctness of detail.

The subject met with the agent
prior to the application of the electrodes. Once the subject was in the sleep
room, they had no further contact. The agent remained in a room 40 feet away
from the subject's room. He had with him one of 12 randomly selected art prints
from the 12 prepared for the experi­ment. He familiarized himself with the
picture and wrote his associations down. He would continue to concentrate on
the picture whenever the experi­menter signaled to him that the subject was
going into a REM phase. The same target was used throughout the night.

The subject was awakened toward
the estimated end of each REM period and asked to relate his dreams, which were
taken down on tape and later trans­cribed. The agent would listen to the
subject reporting his dream, but could not communicate with either the experimenter
or the subject.

The transcripts of the dreams as
well as the subject's associative data were sent to three outside judges along
with copies of the 12 art prints used in the experiment. The judges, working
blindly, compared all 12 targets to each dream transcript. A fourth judge
compared all 12 dream protocols to each target picture. The mean of the three
judges' ranks and ratings were analyzed by two-way analysis of variance (for
targets and nights) according to the Scheffé (1959) method. Similarly, the
rankings made by the 12 subjects were subjected to two-way analysis of
variance. These rankings were further evaluated by the application of the
binomial expansion theorem. Ranks from one through six were referred to as
"hits" and the rankings from seven to twelve as "misses."

Evaluation of the mean scores
for rankings and ratings did not attain statisti­cal significance, but the
results were in the predicted direction. Analysis of the ratings of the fourth
judge were significant at the .01 level. The rankings did not attain
significance. Analysis of the subjects' rankings produced ten "hits"
and two "misses," significant at the .05 level (two-tailed test). The
ratings were higher for the subjects working with the male agent.

Example

A young female teacher served as
subject. The randomly selected target picture was Tamayo's Animals. This
picture depicts two dogs howling and flashing their teeth. Bones picked clean
lie about in the foreground. A huge black rock can be seen in the background.
The points of correspondence are noted in the following excerpts:

Second Dream Report:
"The name of the dream was Black Wood, Vermont or something like
that ....Well, there's this group of people . . . and they have an idea that
they're picked out for something special ... and that these other people were
threatening enemies ...."

Third Dream Report:
"I was at this banquet ... and I was eating something like
rib steak. And this friend of mine was there . . . and people were talking about
how she wasn't very good to invite for dinner because she was very conscious
of outer people getting more to eat than she got - like, especially meat -
because in Israel they don't have so much meat ....That was the most
important part of the dream, that dinner .... It was probably Freudian like all
my other dreams - you known, eating, and all that stuff, and a banquet ....
Well, there was another friend of mine also in this dream. Somebody that I
teach with, and she was eyeing everybody to make sure that everybody wasn't
getting more than she was too. And I was chewing a piece of rib steak. And
I was sit­ting at the table and other people were talking about this girl from Israel,
and they were saying that she's not very nice to invite to eat because she's
greedy, or something like that.

From the Subjects
Associations: "It was about a banquet and we were eating
meat, and people were telling me that this Israeli friend of mine was
not nice to invite to a banquet because she was always afraid she wasn't
getting enough .... I was invited because I'm polite and not demanding, but
I just tried to keep my mouth shut in the dream. I tried not to say anything
about her, even though in a way I was glad that she was finally being found out
.... And the second one ...was about Vermont, Black Rock, Vermont ....
Yester­day, I was at the beach and I was sitting on one of the rocks ... and I
felt like that mermaid from Black Rock ...."

The references to Black Wood
in the second dream and Black Rock in the associations are suggestive of
information conveyed concerning the sensory qualities of the picture. The
voraciousness of the dogs comes through in the sequence describing the
avariciousness of the friend at dinner. Elsewhere, Ullman (1975b) comments:

Presumably
both the sensory image and the emotional message have a significance for the
dreamer which could he tapped if the dreams were dealt with analytically. The
level, nature, and degree of correspondence are probably determined by other
still unknown factors, in addition to the way in which they lend themselves to
the expression of the idiosyncratic needs of the dreamer. This factor of
idiosyncratic choice of precisely what is extracted from the target picture and
incorporated into the dream is quite puzzling. (p. 164)

The First Erwin Study

In the second format, the same
subject was used on repeated nights. The highest scoring subject in the
preceding screening study, Dr. William Erwin, was paired with the male agent
from that study in a seven-night series, using the same basic experimental design
and evaluation procedure (Ullman et al., 1966).

The rankings of the judges of
the dreams alone and in combination with the associative material were
significant (F = 8.30, p < 0.01; F = 18.14, p < 0.001, respectively; 1
and 35 degrees of freedom). Significant results were also obtained from the
judges' ratings as well as from the subject's rankings and confidence ratings.

Example

The target picture was Chagall's
"Paris From a Window," a colorful painting depicting a man observing
the Paris skyline from a window. Certain unusual elements stand out very
clearly: a cat with a human face, several small figures of men flying in the
air, and flowers sprouting from a chair.

Second Dream Period:
"Well, I was dreaming of bees. I guess it was bees. Sort of bees flying
around flowers."

Third Dream Period:
"I was walking. For some reason, I say French Quar­ter .... And I
was walking through different departments in a department store ... talking
with a group of Shriners that were having a convention. They had on a hat
that looked more like a French policeman's hat, you know the French .... I said
French Quarter earlier, but I was using that to get a feel. . . of an early
village of some sort .... It would be some sort of this romantic type of archi­tecture-buildings,
village, quaint."

Fifth Dream Period:
"... The memory I remember is a man, once again walking through one of these
villages, these towns. It would definitely be in the nineteenth century. Attire.
French attire. And he would be walking through one of these towns as though
he were walking up the side of a hill above other layers of the town.

Excerpts Front the
Associative Material: "The thing that stands out is the dream where
I described the village .... It's a festive thing ... the Mardi Gras­ish type
.... Well, the area must be - I mean, just basing it on the costumes and all -
the nineteenth century. Early nineteenth century ... either the Italian or French
or Spanish area .... A town of this area .... It would be of the .. . of
this village type .... Houses very close covering the hills."

A number of minor modifications
in procedure were introduced in the experi­ments that followed in order to
encourage the agent to be more involved with the theme of the target picture; a
series of objects relating to the mood of the target picture were prepared and
coded in connection with the target. Such props afforded the agent the
opportunity to get involved with the target picture in a multisensory fashion.
The subsequent studies arc briefly summarized.

The Second Erwin Study

As in the case of the first
Erwin study, the results confirm the telepathy hypoth­esis (Ullman and
Krippner, 1969). Analysis of the three judges' means for the correspondences
between the targets and the entire protocol produced significant results (F=
6.43; p < 0.001 with 7 and 21 degrees of freedom). Judgings on the basis of
the dreams alone were also significant.

To counter the allegation that
dreams are so vague that any dream can correspond with any picture, a further
analysis was made by a fourth judge. He compared the seven targets used for the
first study and one target used for a pilot session with the eight transcripts
of the second study. The target ratings were analyzed using the Scheffé (1959)
technique. This analysis produced statistically significant data for the
correct target-dream combinations, whereas the "control" combinations
produced chance results.

The Hypnosis Study

Sixteen subjects were divided
into two groups of eight subjects each, a hypnosis group and a nonhypnosis
"relaxed" group. Each subject was assigned one of four agents and was
asked (a) to generate waking imagery in the laboratory, (b) during or
immediately after a rest period in the laboratory, and (c) to keep a dream
diary at home. The judges' evaluations produced significant results with the
hypnosis group in condition (b) and for the nonhypnosis group in
condition (c). The subjects' evaluations were significant for the
nonhypnosis group in condition (a) (Krippner, 1968).

The Second Screening Study

This was a 12-night screening
study utilizing 12 different subjects and two agents. The results did not
attain statistical significance, but were in the predicted direction. In
contrast to the first screening study, no agent differences emerged (Ullman 1969b).

The Posin Study

R. Posin, a female psychologist,
had done well in the second screening study and was singled out for an
eight-night series. Both the judges' and the subject's results were at chance
level although there were interesting correspondences (Ullman and Krippner,
1970).

The Grayeb Study

Miss Grayeb, a young secretary,
was selected for a 16-night study on the basis of her results in the second
screening study. For eight of the nights the agent concentrated on a target;
for the remaining nights there was neither agent nor target. The condition was
determined on a random basis. Results for both conditions were at chance level
(Krippner, 1969).

The Van de Castle Study

Robert Van de Castle, a dream
researcher as well as a parapsychologist, served as the subject for an
eight-night series. Earlier he had produced highly signifi­cant results in a
similar experiment at another laboratory (Hall, 1967). In this study more
emphasis was placed on motivational and psychodynamic factors than in the earlier
work. The subject was allowed to choose his own agent from among the laboratory
staff. He worked with a total of three agents. A female psychologist served as
agent for the first two nights. Ullman was the agent for the second session,
and a female social worker for the remaining five nights. The fact that both
women were young and attractive made for easier rapport.

After each experimental session
the motivational and psychodynamic aspects of the dreams of the night before
were explored with the subject.

The results were evaluated by
the subject and one judge. The subject's rankings produced eight
"hits" and no "misses." This distribution is significant at
the 0.004 level (binomial method). The ratings were significant at the 0.003 level
(Mann-Whitney u Test). The judge's results were also significant. The
analytically oriented interview revealed that the telepathic effect was
strongest in dreams with aggressive and sexual content (Ullman and Krippner,
1970).

The Vaughan Study

Four subjects were used in this
study, each spending eight nights in the labora­tory. For four nights the agent
concentrated on the same target [target condi­tion (a )]; for the remaining
four nights a different randomly selected target was used each time the subject
experienced a REM state [target condition (b)] . Three of the subjects
evaluated their own results, which were significant for target condition (b).
Evaluation by an outside judge was significant for one subject in target
condition (b).

This study was designed to investigate
the hypothesis that the telepathic stimulus may "build up" over the
course of a night and come through more in one of the late REM periods or at
the end of the series. However, none of the results in connection with target
condition (a) attained significance, indicating that there was no "build
up" effect. The agents reported being bored by trying to get involved with
the same target for the four nights. The results seem to favor the
"mutual-resonance" hypothesis, which postulates that a spontaneous
resonance effect occurs in the brains of agent and subject in response to a
novel stimulus (Honorton et al., 1971).

The Hypnotic Clairvoyant Dream Study

Sixty subjects were divided
equally into high- and low-suggestible hypnosis groups. This was a clairvoyant
study, and no agent was used. All the subjects attempted to incorporate the
target material (art prints) clairvoyantly, either in a hypnotically induced
dream or in the course of an imaginative daydream. The subjects evaluated their
own material. Results were significant for the high-­suggestible hypnosis group
(Honorton, 1972).

The First Bessent Study

In an eight-night precognitive study
the British sensitive Malcolm Bessent at­tempted to dream about an experience
that was to be structured for him the following morning, and only after all of
his dreams had been collected. A dream theme would be randomly selected on the
following morning from among the themes described in The Content Analysis of
Dreams (Hall and Van de Castle, 1966), and a visual and auditory display
relating to this theme would then be shown to the subject upon his awakening.

To determine whether the subject
had precognitive dreams about his morn­ing's experience, three outside judges
rated correspondences between each dream protocol and the written description
of the waking experience. The mean of the judges' ratings were subjected to
binomial testing. There were five direct "hits" out of the eight
nights (CR = 3.74, p= .00018) (Krippner et al., 1971).

The Second Bessent Study

A target pool of ten slide-and-sound
sequences was created for this study. On odd-numbered nights the subject was
instructed to dream about the target, which would be randomly selected the
following evening. On even-numbered nights one of the ten sequences was
randomly selected, and the subject was exposed to the slides and the taped
sound accompaniment. He was then told to dream about this target material.

Three outside judges working
blindly and independently were exposed to the eight slide-and-sound sequences
that had been selected for use. In addition, they read all 16 dream protocols
and then rated all the protocols against all eight targets. When the eight
odd-numbered or precognitive nights were inspected, it was found that the
target for those nights received higher ratings than any of the other pairings
for that target in five out of eight instances (p = .0012, one-tailed). When
the eight even-numbered nights were inspected, it was found that the tar­gets
for these nights had not received higher ratings than any of the other pair­ings
for that target (Krippner et al., 1972a).

Extrasensory and Presleep Incorporation of Target Material

In this study, Honorton et al.
(1975) attempted to compare extrasensory and presleep incorporation of target
material in dreams. Forty agent-subject pairs were involved. The targets were
two emotionally arousing and two emotionally neutral films. One emotional and
one neutral film served as targets for each con­dition (ESP and presleep).
There were two nights in each condition, beginning with two ESP nights to avoid
stimulus residues from earlier sessions. On each of the two ESP nights the
agent was shown a different film which the percipient attempted to dream about.
On the two presleep nights, there was no agent. The subject was shown one of
the two remaining target films each night before fall­ing asleep, and was then
awakened at the end of each REM period for a dream report.

For the presleep conditions
there was significant incorporation of both the emotionally arousing and
emotionally neutral films, but the difference between the two target types was
not significant. For the ESP condition, none of the stimuli was incorporated to
a significant degree. Mean incorporation scores of field independent subjects,
as measured by Witkin's Rod-and-Frame Test and Embedded Figures Test, were
significant in the ESP condition for the emotion­ally arousing films (p =
.008).

Replication Studies

Thus far, six replication
studies have been reported. Two produced significant results (Hall, 1967; Ross,
1972), three produced nonsignificant results (Belvedere and Foulkes, 1971;
Foulkes et al., 1972; and Strauch, 1970), and one produced equivocal results
(Globus et al., 1968). Commenting on five of these studies, Krip­pner (1975, p.
177) notes: "All five studies represented the investigators' initial
attempts to study this phenomenon, and it is difficult to predict what the
results would have been had long-range studies been planned."

Keeling (1971) reported a study
involving hypnotic dreaming and telepathy. He trained three highly susceptible
hypnotic subjects to dream hypnotically and then had each subject serve in turn
as agent while the other two served as percip­ients. The agent was given a one-
or two-sentence description as the hypnotic dream stimulus, which the
percipients were to incorporate in their hypnotically induced dreams. The
overall results were reported as significant.

Rechtschaffen (1970) worked with
two subjects under hypnosis, one serving as agent, and one as percipient in an
exploratory telepathy experiment. The agent was given a suggestion to dream
about the subject's dream. The experi­ment involved six pairs of subjects and a
total of 47 pairs of dreams. Dream­-dream matchings produced significant
overall results.

Interesting results of informal studies
have been reported by Van de Castle (1971, 1977).

Comment

The experimental studies
buttress the evidence from other sources for the oc­currence of extrasensory
effects in dreams. Additional findings that have emerged from the experimental
work thus far are as follows:

1. Orientation and expectancy on the part of the subject appear to be
neces­sary for the incorporation of telepathic effects into dreams. When
subjects were not informed that an agent was trying to influence their dreams
telepathically, the results were at a chance level (Krippner, 1975). In another
study a subject was asked to clairvoyantly dream about a randomly selected art
print concealed in a box. Without his knowledge, an agent was at the same time
concentrating on another target picture. The judges detected clear-cut
target-dream corres­pondences for each of the clairvoyant targets, but not for
the telepathy targets (Krippner and Zirinsky, 1971). A long-distance study gave
similar results. This involved using as agents 2000 members of the audience
attending six con­certs of a rock-and-roll group. On all six nights the audience
was shown a six­-slide sequence on the screen and were told to attempt to
transmit the picture to Malcolm Bessent, who was asleep at the Maimonides Dream
laboratory 45 miles away. Without their knowledge, the dreams of a second
subject were re­corded at the same time. The judges' evaluations produced
significant results for Malcolm Bessent and chance results for the other
subject (Krippner et al., 1973).

2. An analysis of all available first night sessions between 1964 and
1969 showed that males did better than females as subjects. They also did
better when paired with a male agent compared with a female agent (Krippner,
1970). This is at odds with the various surveys of spontaneous cases (Green,
1960; Rhine, 1962; Sannwald, 1959a,b), which show that women far outnumber men
in reporting ESP experiences. There is some evidence to suggest that the labora­tory
setting is more anxiety-provoking to women (Lawrence and Shirley, 1970), which
may account for their poor showing in the laboratory situation. These authors
have also noted women to be more reluctant to report their dreams as fully as
men do.

3. Distance did not seem to affect the ability of subjects to
incorporate target material telepathically. Significant results have been
obtained in studies involving distances of 98 feet, 19 miles (Krippner,
Honorton, Ullman, Masters, and Houston, 1971), and 45 miles (Krippner et al.,
1973).

5. The two Bessent studies based on proposals by Dunne (1927) and
Jackson (1967) have provided suggestive evidence that precognitive dreaming can
be demonstrated in an experimental setting.

DREAM TELEPATHY IN THE CLINICAL CONTEXT

Clinical interest in dream
telepathy began with the advent of psychoanalysis. The initial impetus of
Freud's writings on this subject (Freud, 1922, 1925, 1934, 1941) and a volume
by Stekel (1920) was followed by confirmatory reports (Hollós, 1933; Deutsch,
1926; Roheim, 1932; Burlingham,1935; Servadio, 1935), as well as skeptical and
critical ones (Zulliger, 1934; Hann-Kende, 1953; Hitsch­mann, 1924; Schilder,
1934, Saul, 1938). Contemporary interest in the subject was stimulated by the
writings of Ehrenwald (1948, 1954), Eisenbud (1946, 1947, 1970), Servadio
(1935, 1956), Meerloo (1949, 1908), and Ullman (1959, 1966, 1973). Devereux
(1953) provided an anthology of the earlier psycho­analytic contributions and
the controversies that ensued. Three review articles have appeared summarizing
the psychiatric and psychoanalytic contributions to our knowledge of dream
telepathy (Ullman, 1974, 1975a, 1977).

Despite a lingering skepticism,
Freud interested himself in the "occult," particularly from the point
of view of the understanding that psychoanalysis could shed on these phenomena.
His exploration of reports of paranormal dreams led to a number of speculative
hypotheses concerning their dynamics. He felt that such exchanges occurring at
an unconscious level were subject to the same laws of transformation as other
unconscious content before making their way into the dream.

The early writers alluded to stressed
the libidinal and affective aspects of the telepathic contact (Stekel, 1920),
the connection of the message with a re­pressed wish (Hollós, 1933), the
facilitating influence of positive transference (Hann-Kende, 1953; Servadio,
1935), and the role of counter-transferential fac­tors in triggering a
telepathic dream (Eisenbud, 1970). Burlingham (1935), Meerloo (1968), and
Ehrenwald (1971a) speculated on the role telepathy may play in the early mother-child
relationship.

Eisenbud (1970), made explicit
use of the telepathy hypothesis in his inter­pretive exchanges with patients.
He (Eisenbud, 1947) and others (Fodor, 1947; Coleman (1958) also noted that in
the working through of the dynamics of these events, more than one patient at a
time might be involved in a telepathic exchange.

When a dream having reference to
the therapist is encountered in the clinical context, it must meet a number of
criteria before it can be considered as pre­sumptively telepathic. Although no
criterion is sufficient by itself, when taken together the criteria can lead to
the strong, subjective sense that something other than chance or coincidence
was at work. These criteria are:

1. The items of correspondence in question must he unusual; i.e., must be
represented by elements that do not ordinarily appear in dreams.

2. The events in the life of the therapist that these elements have
reference to could not have been known to the patient by any ordinary means.
They could not have been learned through inadvertent behavioral or subvocal
cues, and could not have been inferred based on the knowledge the patient could
have had of the personal life of the therapist.

3. A close temporal relationship should exist between the relevant
events in the life of the therapist and the patient's dream that depicts these
events.

4. Judgments concerning correspondences must include, but not
necessarily be limited to, correspondences apparent at the level of the
manifest content.

5. The final criterion is that of psychological meaning. The
intersecting points of correspondence, when subjected to analysis, must emerge
as dynami­cally meaningful to both patient and therapist.

Clinical Example

An example of presumptively
telepathic dream occurring in the clinical context is as follows:

The patient is a 40 year-old
woman who had been under analysis for 15 months at the time of the occurrence
of the dream. She had been divorced three years earlier, at which time she had
also terminated a one-year analysis with another therapist. She felt that she
had received some help, but that her basic problems concerning men were unchanged.
She had a tendency to slip into rela­tionships with married men, and then to
feel guilty and helpless in the situation and unable to extricate herself.

Her husband, whom she did not
hold in high regard, had been a physician. This, plus her disillusionment
around her previous analysis, made for a consider­able amount of caution and
withdrawal in her relationship to the therapist (one of the present authors). Her
strategy in the main was to attempt to convince the therapist that this was the
way she was and that nothing could be done about it. In many devious ways she
was out to prove that the therapist was well inten­tioned but inept, or not
really interested in her.

The patient presented the
following dream on awakening on a Saturday morn­ing:

I was at home
with John. There was a bottle on the table that contained part alcohol and part
cream. It was sort of a white foamy stuff. John wanted to drink it. I said,
"No, drink it later." I looked at the label. It read: "Appeal­ing
Nausea." I meant to drink it when we went to bed, although we seemed to be
in bed at the time.

The patient
presented another fragment occurring the same night:

I had a small
leopard. It was very dangerous. I wrapped him up and put him in a large bowl. Mother
told me to take him out or he would die.

The patient was seen on a
subsequent Tuesday and began the hour by remark­ing spontaneously that perhaps
there was something to extrasensory perception. This was the first time that
the term had come up in the analytic situation. She stated that on the previous
Friday she had received a phone call from a physician whom she had known
several years before, but with whom she had had no contact during the past two
years. She had been thinking about him just before he phoned, and she could not
recall the last time he had entered her consciousness. She did not attribute
any real significance to this and made the remark in jest.

In connection with the dream,
the only thing she could think of was that the alcohol-cream mixture reminded
her of crème de menthe, a drink that makes her slightly sick. The label
"Appealing Nausea" reminded her of her own revul­sion in connection
with sexual activity. "When I get very excited, I get sick."

On the evening of the preceding
Friday, the night the patient had the dream, my wife and I (the therapist)
attended a meeting at the New York Academy of Medicine to hear a paper
presented on animal neurosis. Part of the film showed the technique of creating
a state of alcohol addiction in cats. One scene showed two cats being offered a
choice between a glass containing milk and another containing milk and half
alcohol. The alcoholic cat, in contrast to the normal cat, went straight for
the alcohol-milk mixture, and completely ignored the glass containing the milk
alone.

The most striking feature of the
dream was the temporal coincidence between the unusual symbolism of a bottle
containing part alcohol and part cream with the scene in the film showing a
glass containing half milk and half alcohol. The second fragment seemed to
supplement the first by introducing a member of the feline family, a leopard.
Also suggestive were her introductory remarks indicat­ing her preoccupation
with the possibility of extrasensory perception in con­nection with someone she
hadn't seen for a number of years. Assuming the validity of the telepathic
factors and integrating them into the analysis of the dream, the interpretation
may be outlined as follows:

Her identification is with the
leopard - the animal whose spots cannot be changed. She has not resolved the
question of trust and hope in therapy. In the dream a physician is trying to
get her to drink the mixture just as in the film the experimenter is responsible
for the cat seeking out the mixture rather than the whole milk and just as, in
reality, she looks with suspicion on the therapist's efforts to force her out
of her withdrawal. The release and spontaneity associ­ated with the alcohol are
experienced in a conflicting way as attractive and re­pulsive al the same time.
The milk, which is normally sought after by a cat, is symbolic of her blandness
and her dependency. In the second dream, the pa­tient, faced with the dilemma
of protecting the leopard, attempts to do so by isolating techniques, but is
warned by a parental figure of the dire consequences unless some of the control
is removed. The patient is in conflict because the whole weight of her past
experience has been to equate release and freedom with disaster and control and
isolation with safety. The scene in the film provides an appropriate concept in
the form of visual imagery expressing the idea that the therapist is as
omnipotent in relation to her as the experimenter was to the cats, and that
seeking sensual gratification under these circumstances would make her vulnerable
to further hurt and exploitation. She is also making a statement about the
detachment and omnipotence of the therapist as she experiences him.

The clinical setting, as well as
the anecdotal reports, implicates the dream as the state most frequently associated
with a telepathic event. There are aspects of dreams and dreaming that suggest
possible reasons for this connection. Mo­tivational systems closer to the core
of the individual come into operation in the dream, compared to waking hours.
The spontaneous occurrence of telepathy in crisis situations suggests that, in
some way, the mobilization of vital needs is implicated. Dreaming as a state of
heightened activation suggests that a vigilance function is operative and
oriented (in the human, at any rate) more to the detec­tion of threats to the
symbolic system, linking the individual to his social milieu, than to threats
involving his state of bodily intactness. We have, in the dreaming state, the
possible advantage of an altered state of consciousness combined with a state
of high arousal and one in which basic motivational systems are activated.

Comment

The psychodynamic context in
which telepathic events are apt to arise may thus be related to both patient
and therapist. Attention has been called to the facili­tating influence of the
strong emotional bond generated in psychoanalytic ther­apy. From the patient's
point of view, what might he called the telepathic maneuver seems to be a ploy
called into operation (1) as a means of deflecting attention from himself
when, in the context of a positive transference, conflict­ual material directed
at the therapist begins to surface; and (2) as a reaction to what the
patient senses as a withdrawal of interest on the part of the therapist, under
which circumstances it then becomes a strategy for dramatically refocus­ing
that interest back to the patient.

From the therapist's standpoint,
a somewhat different constellation of pre­disposing factors appears to be
operating. Interest in and belief in the reality of telepathic events seems to
favor their occurrence. Several writers (Pederson-­Krag, 1947; Ullman, 1959) on
the subject have noted the appearance of telepathic dreams in their patients
when they themselves, pursuing their own interest, had further need for such
material. There is also general agreement that temporary distractions and
preoccupations, deflecting the therapist's attention from the patient, often
becomes the focal point of a telepathic experience for the patient.
Counter-transferential tensions are particularly apt to be unmasked by a
telepathic maneuver on the part of the patient. Servadio (1958) notes this in
connection with the thoughts the analyst may have that are prejudicial or inim­ical
to the patient.

The conditions outlined as
favoring the occurrence of telepathic dreaming may, in each instance, be
experienced as prejudicial by the patient. In one way or another the patient
may sense the interest, need, and tension of the analyst as adversely
influencing the relationship or as interfering with the maintenance of the
analyst's clear focus on the therapeutic situation. The occur­rence of a
telepathic dream under these circumstances constitutes a safe way of
"needling" the therapist insofar as it both exposes the patient's
awareness of the therapist's dereliction and at the same time does so in a way
that leaves the ther­apist impotent to do anything about it unless he owns up
to the manner in which his own preoccupations and concerns may at the moment
obstruct the progress of the analysis.

Various generalizations have
been proposed to account for the appearance of telepathy in the analytic context.
Freud (1933), Meerloo (1949), and Ehrenwald (1971b) regarded telepathy as an
archaic communication system available for use when other forms of communication
were blocked.

Ehrenwald (1971a) implicated the
early mother-child symbiosis as the nexus out of which telepathic exchanges
evolved. He also suggested (1971b) that psi events tend to occur on occasions
when, for external or internal reasons, we experience a shift away from a
time-and space-oriented existence (a Newtonian frame of reference suitable for
our everyday waking lives) toward a nonlinear form of consciousness, as in the
occurrence of sleep and dreams. He likened this to a relativistic mode and
referred to the change in level of adaptation as an existential shift. This can
be transitory, incidental, and subtle in the course of our waking lives or
occur in the form of sharp qualitative shifts, as in the case of dreaming or
drug-induced alterations in consciousness. In either instance, the shift seems
to favor the recrudescence of paranormal powers originating in an earlier
relational context.

Ullman (1949, 1952) noted that
patients who function on schizoid or obsessional levels manifest psi ability
in the therapeutic context more frequently and more consistently than do other
patients. It is as if having used language so long in the service of
maintaining distance from others, they reach a point of no re­turn in their
efforts to maintain meaningful communicative bonds with others, including the
therapist. This appears to be the circumstance under which tele­pathic faculties
are mobilized.

In his biographical
reminiscences Jung (1963) revealed a life-long interest in the paranormal and recounted
many incidents occurring throughout his life of both ESP and psychokinesis. In
his effort to provide some kind of fit for these experiences, he boldly
postulated the existence in nature of a second principle equal in importance to
the principle of causality. He referred to this as the principle of synchronicity
and defined it to mean that in addition to the exis­tence of a causal order
which links external events to subjective impressions, there can exist another
order effecting such linkages on the basis of meaning alone. Paranormal events
were thus defined as acausal, meaningful coincidences. This principle became
operative when, in a given context, there occurred a dove­tailing of external
events with the realization of "constellation' of an upsurging archetypal
impression. Jung thus sought to establish a dynamic link between a paranormal
event and the emergence of a specific archetype at a given moment.

The role psi effects play in
dream formation, the emergence of psi factors in the context of transference and
counter-transference, the interpretive use of the telepathy hypothesis, the
characterologic significance of psi abilities, and the possible role that psi
plays in the evolution and manifestation of psychopathol­ogy are some of the
areas were beginning explorations have taken place and where much more clinical
and investigative work will have to be done before a full account can be given
of the relevance of psi factors to psychiatry.

THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Quite apart from the question of
the validity of parapsychological data in rela­tion to dreaming, there is a
need for a holistic approach to the data we now have on the psychology and
physiology of dreaming. In the absence of any unifying concept, the newer
findings are apt to remain atomistic and perhaps more puz­zling than they need
be. This particularly applies to any artificial separation of human and animal
data. The mounting evidence supporting the reality of extra­sensory
communication in dreaming makes it all the more incumbent to seek out a unified
way of viewing the various manifestations of the dreaming phase of the sleep
cycle.

A holistic view emphasizes the
fact that parts relate to the whole on the basis of a system principle
governing the whole (Angyal, 1941). Part functions and part structures are
organized according to and are subordinate to the main sys­tem principle. In
the case of dreaming, for example, our task would be to iden­tify the main
system principle and then explore the way in which the findings of the various
experimental studies contribute toward actualizing this principle. In what
follows the concept of vigilance is explored as the organizing or leading
system principle in relation to which the phenomenology of the REM state and
dreaming can he ordered. The question being addressed is: What are the vigi­lance
needs of the sleeping organism? This approach was first developed by Ull­man
(1956) on clinical grounds and later considered in relation to the recent
experimental work on sleep (Ullman, 1958, 1969a, 1973), and the investigative
work on dream telepathy (Ullman, 1969b, 1972). A similar approach was taken by
Snyder (1963, 1966) in his interpretation of the phylogenetic and evolutionary
meaning of REM sleep. Tolaas (1976, 1978) reviewed these for­mulations and
presented an expanded view of vigilance theory to accommodate the human and
animal data as well as the pertinent data concerning extrasensory communication
and dreaming.

Dreaming and Social Vigilance

Ullman (1973) conceived of
dreaming sleep as repetitive cycles of heightened vigilance manifested along
both physiological and psychological dimensions. He suggested that, while
dreaming, the organism is involved in the process of assess­ing the impact of
recent intrusive novel events in terms of the linkage of these events to past
experience and their implication for the immediate future. Al­though clinically
derived, this view seemed in keeping with later work interpret­ing the REM state
as a state of readiness for the urgencies of waking life (Hernandez-Péon, 1966;
Ruffwarg et al., 1966).

The vigilance process unfolds in
two phases, an exploratory one to assess the implications of the issues being
raised, and a reconstituted one where through internal rearrangements
personality resources are mobilized to cope with the un­settling event. The
dreamer may have the resources necessary to arrive at a creative resolution, or
he may have to resort to habitual defensive responses. There are two possible
outcomes to these operations. Depending on the degree of tension generated in
the dream, either the dreaming cycle continues without interruption or
awakening occurs.

For the human organism, the
nature of the threat has shifted from a concern with physical danger to a
concern with the safeguarding of his status as a social being. Man, as a
species, has accumulated enough cultural artifacts to offer protection against
most physical threats to his existence. His nighttime concerns have come to
focus on his continuing sense of intactness as a social organism. Vigilance
operations, accordingly, become more subtle, sophisticated, and social in nature.
The content of the dream is defined by this fact. The intrusive events giving
rise to the dream range from the trivial to the critical, but they all involve
unexpectedness, unpreparedness, and a change in the status quo.

The initiating focus in a dream
evolves from a recent event in our lives, having the qualities of being both intrusive
and novel. The novelty either may be defined in terms of the qualities
intrinsic to the external circumstance (as in the case of exposure to a totally
unfamiliar life situation), or it may be defined by the existence of internal
strategies of self-deception that limit our ability to cope with a situation
that should ordinarily offer no difficulty. Since there tend to be many gaps
and lacunae in our emotional development, the latter is the more frequent
source of dream content. Our dreams then confront us with some of the
unintended consequences of our defensive operations. Therein lie their
therapeutic value.

One of the characteristics of
dreaming is a backward scanning into remote memory stores in an effort to link
the impact of a present situation to past ex­perience. The result of this
information search is organized along lines of emo­tional contiguity rather
than in temporal and spatial categories. The data pertain­ing to dream telepathy
and precognitive dreaming suggest that this scanning process can, on occasion,
bridge temporal and spatial gaps to provide information independently of any
known communication channel (Ullman, 1972).

Dreaming and Survival Needs

REM sleep is regarded as the
phylogenetically older phase of sleep (Snyder, 1966) and is found throughout
the mammalian species. In the pre-REM era, Rivers (1923) suggested that the
dream state in animals served to awaken the animal in the presence of danger,
thus anticipating Snyder's sentinel thesis (1965, 1966).

The latter holds that repetitive
bouts of physiological arousal provide the necessary critical reactivity
enabling the organism to cope with threats on awakening. There can be little
doubt that a sleep stage which enabled the animal to adapt to external danger
while still asleep, would have great survival value.

Tolaas (1976, 1978) raised a
number of objections to Snyder's thesis. It does not account for the high
proportion of REM sleep in the neonatal mammalian organism. It does not account
for the loss of muscle tonus characteristic of the REM state, a finding which
seems to be incompatible with preparation for fight or flight. Finally, the
presence of a warning system interspersed in sleep presupposes some kind of
synchrony between external dangers and the REM periods but says nothing about
the response to dangers appearing between REM periods. Emphasizing the need of
the organism to heed potentially threatening environmental stimuli, the
sentinel thesis does not address itself to why there is such a need during the
REM periods; nor does it account for the paradoxical loss of tone in the
anti-gravity muscles combined with high cortical arousal.

Addressing these questions,
Tolaas (1978) has suggested that while dreaming, the organism remains
selectively aware of meaningful or threatening environ­mental stimuli while at
the same time fulfilling another aspect of vigilance by attending to the dream
imagery that is being produced. The pattern is one of interaction between two
orientations - toward environmental stimuli and toward the dream imagery.
Motor activity is inhibited in connection with this inward orientation. Tolaas
suggests that when dreaming occurs, it must be attended to, a fact which then
exposes the dreaming organism to possible physical danger and involves a need
for an alerting mechanism.

It is implicit in this view that
REM sleep is associated with imagery in infra­human organisms as well as in
man. Writing about dream imagery in very young children, Doob (1972) suggests
that dream imagery may occur even before the dreams can be reported verbally
and hence "images may be as primordial as any nonphysiological function
that can he postulated" (p. 313). This thesis can be extended to include
animals as well as humans. Doob's point is that images are ubiquitous and
reflect a human ability that has survived from an earlier evolu­tionary stage.
Is this image-forming an exclusively human phenomenon? Through imagery the
organism can confront the environment on a symbolic level and be in contact
with its own past.

Beritashvili (1969) concludes
from animal studies that when higher vertebrates first perceive food in a given
place, they form an image or concrete representation of the food and its
environmental location. This image, which is improved with every new perception
of the object, is not obliterated but is preserved and is re­producible
whenever a given environment or some component of it is perceived. It has been
pointed out that Beritashvili's concept of image behavior is highly reminiscent
of Totman's concept of cognitive maps (Cole and Maltzman, 1969).

Further studies are beginning to
shed light on the representational processes of animals (Mason, 1976). In
anthropoids the evidence of image behavior in Beritashvili's sense is very
strong. These animals have good memories and do seem to remember selectively.
Evidence suggestive of visual imagery in other species may he subsumed in four
categories:

1. There is suggestive anecdotal evidence. Anyone who has observed a pet
during REM sleep will have noticed movements and twitches of the limbs, tail, ears,
and facial muscles. The animal seems to be acting out an inner experience very
suggestive of dreaming. Such observations are in keeping with a reasonable
interpretation of the REM phase in cats reported by Jouvet (1961).

2. Studies by Evarts (1962), involving implanted microelectrodes in the
visual pathways and the visual cortex in the unrestrained cat, have shown
unusually high rates of unit discharge during REM sleep similar to those in the
active waking state. Similar findings have been reported by Huttenlocher (1961)
and by Arduini et al. (1963) in the pyramidal tract.

3. As in humans (Kety, 1965), REM steep in animals is associated with a
marked increase in cortical blood flow comparable to the level of the active
wak­ing state (Kanzow et al., 1962).

4. A finding by Vaughan (1966) is also suggestive of visual imagery in
monkeys. He trained rhesus monkeys to press a bar whenever images were flashed
on a screen, to avoid shock. During REM periods, but not during non-REM
periods, these monkeys were observed to press the bar as if they were watching
internal imagery.

Snyder (1966) suggests that
animals dream about their instinctual repertoire. If this is so, it is hard to
see what functional role it serves. If animals do have imagery during REM sleep,
that imagery might serve a bidirectional, orienting purpose, as alluded to
earlier. It might reflect significant stimuli reaching the organism through
sensory or extrasensory means. The imagery would have to be on target and
intense enough to arouse the organism to take action. This would represent the
environmental direction of the dreaming process.

The other direction of the
process is concerned with the intrinsic role of spon­taneously generated
imagery. More and more dreaming appears to be linked with learning. The
all-inclusiveness of this term tends to complicate any discussion of the
relevant data. However, some workers (Greenberg and Pearlman, 1974; Pearlman
and Becker, 1971) have adopted the distinction between prepared learning, or
species-specific learning that occurs quickly and involves little adap­tive
change, and unprepared learning, or species-specific learning taking longer and
involving extensive adaptive change. It this distinction is applied to the
truss of apparently conflicting data oil REM sleep and learning in humans and
animals, a meaningful pattern appears. Learning of novel, unmastered tasks (i.e.
unprepared learning) turns out to require posttrial REM sleep in animals and is
fre­quently followed by an increase in REM sleep in humans (Tolaas, 1978).
Learn­ing of habitual reactions (i.e., prepared learning), on the contrary,
appears to be REM-independent. Thus REM sleep or dreaming sleep is associated
with species-­specific events/tasks involving surprise and unpreparedness. In
the dreaming state the main concern of the organism is exploration of problems
and hitches bearing on its relatedness with its environment, and not on
manipulation of the environ­ment through motor activity as in the waking state.
This explains the lack of tonus associated with REM sleep. However, the
adaptive function of the dream­ing process needs protection through enhanced
sensitivity to threats (predators, fires, floods, and so on) and an increase in
critical reactivity. Therefore, vigi­lance operations point in two directions,
toward the dream drama (internal direction) and the outside world (external
direction) in a pattern serving emo­tional adaptation.

At hardly any other time in life
is emotional adaptation and unprepared learn­ing as important as in the early
postnatal period, when most of the time is spent in sleep and a significant
proportion of the total sleep time in REM sleep, both in humans and animals.
The young, who must pay attention to the dream imagery, do indeed need an
alerting mechanism (enhanced sensitivity to threats). How­ever, this mechanism
would be of no use if it did not help them reach the signifi­cant adult. This
would certainly be true of the "great dreamers," i.e., those species
who spend more time in REM sleep than others. Interestingly, these are the
species whose central nervous systems are immature at birth, e.g.., rats, cats,
rabbits, and humans, and who are consequently helpless (Jouvet, 1969). The
`'great dreamers," when young, are unable to cope with physical threats by
them­selves. In the absence of protective adults, an approaching predator may
mean death, particularly if the young are asleep and dreaming, as they often
are. Tolaas (1978) suggests that circumstances such as these may be the source
and origin of the telepathic bonding between mother and infant. Once the
dreaming young locates the threat, incorporates it into dream imagery, and
interprets it as threat­ening, it may wake up and call the significant adult.
But when the mother/parents are away gathering food and out of hearing range,
as they often must be, the young organism asleep and dreaming would be the easy
prey of an approaching predator. Dream telepathy may serve the important
function of bridging the gap between a vulnerable dreaming organism exposed to
threats and a protective adult, in most cases the mother, as fathers tend to
leave the mothers long before the birth.

Extrasensory communication is not
limited to the REM periods, nor is it likely that it is involved only in major
crises; but as REM sleep is phylogenetically and ontogenetically more primitive
than slow-wave sleep (Jouvet, 1969), dream telepathy may be conceived of as the
original means of maintaining communicative ties in the early symbiotic period
in all mammalian species when "ordi­nary" sensory channels are unable
to bridge the spatial and temporal gap to the mother/parents.

REFERENCES

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